Anthropic co-founder on quitting OpenAI, AGI predictions, $100M talent wars, 20% unemployment, and the nightmare scenarios keeping him up at night | Ben Mann

You wrote somewhere that creating powerful AI might be the last invention humanity ever needs to make. How much time do we have, Ben? I think fiftieth percentile chance of hitting some kind of superintelligence is now like twenty twenty eight. What is it that you saw at Open AI what you experienced there that made you feel like okay, we gotta go do our own thing. We felt like safety wasn't the top priority there. The case for safety. has gotten a lot more concrete. So superintelligence is a lot of about like how do we keep God in the box and not let the God out. What are the odds that we align AI correctly? Once we get to superintelligence, it will be too late to align the models. My best granularity forecast for like Could we have an X risk or extremely bad outcome is somewhere between zero and ten percent? Something that's in the news right now is this whole Zuck coming after all the top AI researchers. We've been much less affected because people here, they get these offers and then they say, Well, of course I'm not gonna leave because my best case scenario at Meta is that we make money. And my best case scenario at Anthropic is we like affect the future of humanity. Dario, your CO recently talked about how unemployment might go up to something like twenty percent. If you just think about Like twenty years in the future, where we're like way past the singularity. It's hard for me to imagine that even capitalism will look at all like it looks today. Do you have any advice for folks that want to try to get ahead of this? I'm not immune to job replacement either. At some point, it's coming for all of us.

Today my guest is Benjamin Mann. Holy moly, what a conversation. Ben is the co-founder of Anthropic. He serves as tech lead for product engineering. He focuses most of his time and energy on aligning AI to be helpful, harmless, and honest. Prior to Anthropic, he was one of the architects of GPT three at OpenAI.

In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground. Including his thoughts on the recruiting battle for top AI researchers, why he left open AI to start Anthropic. How soon he expects we'll see AGI, also his economic touring test for knowing when we've hit AGI, why scaling laws have not slowed down, and are in fact accelerating, and what the current biggest bottlenecks are. why he's so deeply concerned with AI safety, and how he and Anthropic operationalize safety and alignment into the models that they build and into their ways of working. Also, how the existential risk from AI has impacted his own perspectives on the world and his own life.

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